Coronavirus: 132 cases in Italy. Going to be third infected country in the world | Hacker News Reader

Coronavirus: 132 cases in Italy. Going to be third infected country in the world

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14 pointsfbn799 comments

Just going to chime in with a slightly tangential issue. It's sad to see that many threads like this are being suppressed on HN (probably just from lack of interest). I have to use the HN search tool to find them.

From what I can tell, there are lots of smug "it's just the flu" takes prevalent in the mainstream of HN commentary.

Sad, because I think there is lots of interesting discussion that could be happening around various facets of this outbreak.

yep, downvotes as expected. God forbid we express any meta commentary about potential blind spots/biases in this community.

I am wondering if all these cases emerged because of the large scale investigation going on. Is it possible that the coronavirus is more spread than expected, but there are more asymptomatic cases than what we think? Are other countries doing the same? It is quite strange that everything started all together from different part of the country and they didn't find the patient zero.

Given month of incubation time (from when you catch it, and are asymptomatic, but still spread it), it's not unreasonable to assume for sake of alternate models it's been spreading since November and people just thought of it as case of particularly bad cold. Only know of it since it got too big to hide by Chinese govt.

It's always more spread than expected because the symptoms of infected people take time to appear and temperature screening is almost useless. An actually effective way pandemics can be stopped for sure requires an international effort and discipline... quarantined people must stay isolated from others and prevented from entering any country until the maximum incubation time. It sucks for commerce and tourism, but that's just too bad. It's a fail of reckless, spineless officials who enable infected idiots to turn an isolated disease into a worldwide pandemic.

> ... It sucks for commerce and tourism, but that's just too bad.

Which is exactly why coutries with heavy tourism, such as Thailand aren't reporting the real number of cases they have (my personal assumption).

> An actually effective way pandemics can be stopped for sure requires an international effort and discipline... quarantined people must stay isolated from others and prevented from entering any country until the maximum incubation time.

How would this be possible with asymptomatic and subclinical spread? With the absence/unreliability of testing you'd damn near need to quarantine anyone with mild cold/flu symptoms.

Even China now appears to be relaxing their quarantines because of concerns about the economic impact.

I think we're just going to be dealing with this over the next 12-18 months, as countries see it arrive and spread within their borders.

Many people (probably more than in other European countries) travelled to Italy from China, and some of them arrived before the quarantine effort got serious.

We'll see how the relative contributions of fewer sources of infection and more haphazard detection balance out in other countries over the next few weeks.

I don't see how containment is possible without much more robust testing.

How can you contain if you aren't detecting?

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